Next weekend on Marketplace, guest host David Lazarus will take a look at the debate behind the minimum wage across the U.S. Does the minimum wage force companies to layoff low-paid employees? Or is a living wage fair to employees?

Have you ever lived on the minimum wage in your area? We want to hear your stories. Send us an email or reach us on Twitter, @MarketplaceWKND

The Labor Department reports that employee compensation — wages, salaries and benefits — increased 0.2 percent in the second quarter of 2015. The employment cost index increased 0.7 percent in the first quarter, and economists expected about the same pace of growth for the second quarter. The annual rate of compensation inflation was 2 percent in the second quarter, compared to 2.6 percent for the first quarter. Compensation for private-sector employees was unchanged in the quarter; compensation for government workers rose 0.6 percent.

A separate measure of employment income from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment situation report has shown hourly earnings increasing at 2 percent (the annual rate for June 2015), the same anemic growth rate as reported in the second quarter employment cost index.

These labor-cost measures inform an ongoing debate as to whether the job market has largely returned to health after the Great Recession or if it is still weak, leaving behind millions of people who want to work or earn a better income.

Economist Ozlem Yaylaci at IHS Global Insight says the weak second quarter ECI report contradicts evidence of an employment market that has mostly returned to health.

“It’s a big shock,” says Yaylaci, “because we see employment numbers very solid month to month, and the unemployment rate has been declining. We are now close to full employment.” The unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent in June.

Labor economist Jesse Rothstein at University of California, Berkeley says in such a positive labor-market scenario, it would be easier for people to find jobs and harder for employers to attract and hire qualified workers. He says employers could be expected to lower their requirements for job applicants and to offer new hires more training, rather than expecting them to have job-specific skills and capabilities when they apply.

“We’d also be looking for evidence that wages are increasing as employers need to pay more to attract workers to jobs,” Rothstein says. “We’re not seeing evidence of any of these, which suggests that we really are still in a situation with a lot of slack in the labor market.”

Rothstein believes there is a shadow labor pool that isn’t showing up in the standard unemployment data but is strengthening employers' bargaining power and helping them maintain lower wages without suffering labor shortages. This shadow labor pool includes people who have dropped out of the labor force or never entered because of poor job prospects, but who might start job hunting if their prospects improved. Labor market slack is also fed by people working part time who can’t find full-time work, and people working in jobs below their training, education or experience level.

“She’s concerned because measures of the labor market, such as the unemployment rate, sometimes don’t measure the slack in the labor market correctly,” Yaylaci says. If that diagnosis is correct, the economy might not be strong enough yet to take the medicine of lower interest rates.

Groups of federal contract workers have been walking off the job and holding protests every few months.

It’s part of a campaign called Good Jobs Nation, backed by organized labor. It's pushing for a $15 an hour minimum wage for federal contract workers and union representation. The most recent demonstration was in Washington, in late July.

Sontia Bailey is one of the government contract workers speaking out at the rallies. She’s a cashier in a Senate cafeteria, working for a contractor hired by the government. It pays her $10.59 per hour.

Sontia Bailey

Good Jobs Nation

I met her recently in a park down the hill from the Capitol.

“I’ve worked at the Capitol for two years and seven months,” she told me.

Bailey says her Capitol paycheck didn’t pay all of her bills. So, two years ago, she got a second job at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She says she had a miscarriage recently because she was working so much.

“I do, probably like 40 hours plus at the Capitol, then 30 plus hours at KFC," she says. "So I really didn’t have time to rest, because I never had a day off.”

The government started replacing full-time federal workers with contract employees back in the '80s, under the Reagan administration. The idea has had bipartisan support over the years and is part of initiatives to control government spending.

Supporters of privatization say it does save the government money. Among them: Adrian Moore, vice president of the free-market Reason Foundation, says contractors are more efficient than the federal government.

“Contractors don’t use as many workers to do the same work," he says. "They run with leaner workforces.”

But Moore also says contracting has to be done well to save money. Contractors have to be supervised.

Jeffrey Miron is an economist at Harvard and the libertarian Cato Institute. He says supervision is needed from the moment contractors submit bids to the federal government.

“The bidding process can be somewhat messy and complicated," he says. "It can sometimes be rigged, it can sometimes be manipulated. So it’s not a completely fail-safe approach.”

That’s led to a backlash against privatization, and assertions that it doesn’t save the government money. Tara Young is an organizer with Good Jobs Nation.

I met Young in the park with the Senate cashier, Sontia Bailey. Young says the contractor employees make so little, they end up on government programs for the poor. Bailey is on Medicaid.

“Workers are on Section 8, they use food stamps," she says. "So we’re paying workers extra money, really, to help them with their low pay.”

Young says taxpayers get hit up twice: once to pay for the contract workers’ salaries and again to pay for government programs they need to get by.

Negotiations wrap up Friday in the latest round of the five-year-old Trans-Pacific Partner negotiations, with final sticking points remaining over sugar, dairy, state-owned enterprises and the exclusivity period granted to the makers of certain types of drugs.

Ministers from the U.S., Japan, Canada and nine other countries are negotiating in private at a resort on the Hawaiian island of Maui to hash out the agreement’s final details.

“As anyone who has been in trade negotiations knows, those final decisions are always the most difficult,” Michael Froman, the U.S. Trade Representative, said earlier this week.

Outside the negotiation rooms, official advisers, congressional staff, trade groups, lobbyists and nonprofit advocates roam the resorts’ lobby, using every spare plug to charge phone and laptops, meeting among themselves and hoping to catch a moment with the delegates, either through official briefings or unguarded moments in the elevator or hotel restaurants.

“I’ve adopted the Starbucks strategy,” says James Love with Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit organization that focuses on intellectual property issues. “When I see someone come up to get a coffee, and I see a blue [identification] badge, I know they’re a delegate.”

He asks them how the negotiations are going, what areas they’re working on and offers up his perspective on drug monopolies and other issues.

“It’s a bit like that guy who hits on every woman in the bar,” Love admits. “A lot of people don’t like to do it because they feel like they’re being a jerk or it’s a little bit annoying, but I’m willing to do that.”

He’s chosen three issues to focus on as the trade enters its final stages of negotiation, based on where he thinks he can have the most impact. At this point, he says it’s too late for the long shots and focusing on the low-hanging fruit isn’t a good use of time.

“Balance is the key term or catch phrase,” says a weary Auggie Tantillo, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, who’s also prioritizing limited issues as negotiations wind down. He’s accepted that markets will open and has chosen to focus instead on what provisions might be put in place to ease the transition, such as eliminating tariffs gradually over time.

That's how long negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership have dragged on, as negotiators have tried to work out the details of various sticking points, like sugar, dairy and state-owned enterprises. What has been called the final round of negotiations will wrap up Friday in Maui, Hawaii.

100

That's how many moms will be selected by McDonald's Japan to tour its facilities. Some of the winners will even receive trips to the U.S. and Thailand. It's part of a larger effort by the company to combat a dramatic drop in business — the hope is to gain some positive PR from the mothers' perspective, which is "watchful, critical and honest at the same time," in the words of CEO Sarah Casanova. As the Wall Street Journal reports, June saw a 23 percent drop in same-store sales from the same month a year earlier.

30 percent

In some cases, that's how much the cost of a Gibson guitar has increased with newer models in recent years. Part of the reason for the cost increase is a self-tuning mechanism — push a button, and your guitar automatically tunes itself. But some instrumentalists argue that it's an unnecessary technology, as smartphone apps allow for precise tuning without the extra gadget.

96 percent

That's the fatality rate of batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, a fungus, among wildfire salamanders. The fungus has decreased populations of frogs, newts and salamanders around the world, and in some cases, is responsible for the wiping out entire species. As UPI reports, scientists in California have now asked for a ban on importing salamanders until a plan is in place to address the spread of the fungus.

$60 million

That's how much the Puerto Rican government is due to repay on Monday to bondholders — it reportedly is preparing statements saying it will not be able to make the payment. One particular difficulty for the economy of the commonwealth is that it lacks an industry outside of tourism.

Before the recession, economists predicted a massive wave of retirements would begin in the 2010s, as the baby boomer generation (those born between 1946-1964) started hitting 65.

And it is certainly the case that some boomers are retiring. But not in the numbers, or at the pace, that economists earlier predicted. In fact, the labor force participation rate for people 55 and older (at 39.9 percent in June 2015, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) is near its highest level in several decades, up by approximately one-third since 1990.

A recent report by AARP crunching survey data of older workers finds that nearly half (44 percent) are now planning to work part-time after they reach retirement age, and one-third (33 percent) are delaying the age at which they expect retire. Factors driving these decisions include many older workers’ and retirees’ financial losses during and after the recession, and their financial concerns going forward, especially in light of increasing life-expectancy.

Many older Americans have little choice in the matter and simply need to continue working as long as they can, if they can. The same AARP report finds that nearly half of Americans 50 and over have $25,000 or less saved for retirement. The Economic Policy Institute, which researches labor-force trends, estimates that there are 57,000 men 70 to 74, and 69,000 women 75 and up, who are currently working but would not be in the workforce today if the recession hadn’t hit their savings and earnings so hard.

This generation of would-be retirees is the Woodstock generation, and at 79, attorney Martin Cramer precisely fits the bill. He was at Woodstock; in 1969 he was working as a young associate for the New York law firm that represented the festival promoters and some of the artists who took the stage that legendary weekend.

“I remember clearly, [New York] Lt. Gov. Malcolm Wilson was in charge, and he wanted to send in the National Guard in uniform,” Cramer remembers. "And I said, 33-year-old me, I said to his chief of staff, 'If he does that, I’ll sue all you guys, and you’ll be responsible for the biggest riot in the state.'”

Cramer was on vacation with his wife, kids and grandkids on a recent July weekend at his country house in upstate New York. It’s a house he built himself but can no longer work on because of arthritis in his hands. He gave up commercial litigation several years ago and no longer goes into court — he found that his hearing loss was compromising his practice.

Still, "vacation" is real for Cramer. He continues to work three to four days a week in New Jersey, handling wills, trusts and estates for a wide clientele that has been with him for decades.

“I realize I do it because I enjoy it,” Cramer says. “I need the intellectual stimulation. I need something to keep me actively occupied.”

“The labor force participation rate for people 55 and older is basically as high as we’ve seen in a couple generations,” Rutledge says. “People used to work a long time, back when pensions and Social Security were more generous. Then, for a long time, people were retiring in their early 60s. Now it’s more like 64 or 65, especially for men, and women are catching up as well.

“As life expectancy increases, so are retirement ages,” Rutledge continues. “So people are responding to the fact that they’re going to live longer and therefore they have more years to cover. And because they’re now healthier, each one of those years is a little bit easier to work.”

The recession and slow recovery mean many seniors have less to work with than they anticipated. Cramer and his wife lost a bundle in the Bernie Madoff scandal. Others have had more mundane setbacks.

“Social Security benefits aren’t going to be replacing their income at the rates that they used to in previous generations,” Rutledge says. “People’s pensions aren’t as generous as they used to be in all likelihood, people just haven’t saved all that much, housing values have fallen, as we saw during the recession.”

Bill Saphir, 71, of Portland, Oregon, can relate to this. In 2008, he was downsized out of a senior management job in health care. Now, he’s trying to make it as an independent consultant.

“There’s creative juices that I still have to work out, and that means working,” Saphir says. “I had a small cushion, and it is running down. My wife wants me to retire. But I really can’t— we can’t afford it.”

But if Martin Cramer keeps doing wills and estates into his 80s, if Bill Saphir is still a health care consultant well into his 70s, if thousands of other older workers decide to delay retirement, won’t that crowd out younger people coming up in the workforce?

Economist Matthew Rutledge calls this idea the "the lump of labor" fallacy: “There’s only a certain amount of jobs out there, and if an old person’s holding that job that means a young person isn’t.”

Rutledge says economic studies tend to show the opposite is true. “Old people working is good for the economy,” he says. “When old people are working instead of being retired, they have a lot more money to spend.”

Homes that are underwater — mortgaged for more than they’re worth — represent a much smaller fraction of the housing market than they did a few years ago, according to a new report from RealtyTrac, a real estate data company. However, some parts of the country are doing much better than others.

The national average, at 13.3 percent, isn’t all the way back to normal, but it would sound awfully good to places like Tampa, Cleveland, Las Vegas — or Chicago, where almost a quarter of mortgages are still underwater.

Percentage of homes seriously underwater based on county (Data courtesy RealtyTrac)

Ironically, one culprit may be state and local homeowner protections that make it harder for banks to foreclose, according to Daren Blomquist, vice president for Realty Trac.

"You have many properties that are kind of sitting in foreclosure limbo," he says. "And not only are those properties likely underwater, they’re likely dragging down the values of surrounding homes."

In Chicago and elsewhere, underwater homes tend to be in the poorest neighborhoods.

"What’s happening on the Gold Coast in Chicago — which is very expensive — has very little to do with what’s happening in traditionally disadvantaged areas on the South or the West Side of the city," says Spencer Cowan, senior vice president for research at the Woodstock Institute, a local think-tank focused on economic equity.

Eight ZIP codes on Chicago’s South and West Sides have underwater rates above 50 percent — more than three times the rate for the Gold Coast area.

That's how much imported goods from China to Egypt dropped in April, the month Egypt announced a ban on imported traditional tourist items. In the wake of the revolution in 2011, many local manufacturers closed down as tourism dwindled. But as visitors returned, imported goods from China filled the need for miniature pyramids and special lanterns.

25 percent

That's the percentage of Medicare spending that consistently pays for end-of-life care. Costs related to hospice services continue to rise; half of Medicare patients who died in 2013 were in hospice care. That's double what it was in 2000.

60 years

That's how long KFC has been around in Canada. And to celebrate, the company is releasing a high-tech chicken bucket that doubles as a photo printer. As Slate reports, the bucket connects to your phone via Bluetooth. No word yet on whether or not the bucket is, indeed, finger lickin' good.

That's the national average percentage of homes on the market that are underwater, meaning they were mortgaged for more than they're worth. But that's only part of the story. In cities like Chicago, that percentage spikes in poorer neighborhoods, where as much as 25 percent of homes on the market are deemed underwater.

]]>Thu, 30 Jul 2015 09:51:51 GMTLooking for the bright side in Bakken's busthttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/looking-bright-side-bakkens-bust

Thousands of workers moved to rural North Dakota to take jobs in the Bakken oil field. Now, with global oil prices half what they were a year ago, there are fewer rigs, fewer trucks on the country roads and fewer jobs. Don Williams, who lives and works in Ross, says the bust could have at least one positive aspect.

Click the media player above to hear the interview with Don Williams.

Todd's series, "Black Gold Boom," is an initiative of Prairie Public and the Association for Independents in Radio.

That's how many chickens were taken out by the last bout of bird flu that swept the Midwest. And now, poultry industry groups and government officials have been meeting in Iowa to prepare for the next possible wave of the disease, as migratory birds, the virus carriers, will take wing in the fall.

22

That's how many buttons can be found on the remote control in Japan for ... a toilet. High-tech toilets have become popular in that country, but have yet to find a market in the U.S. But that may be changing. Toto, a popular brand, reports that U.S. sales are increasing 20 percent a year.

20 seconds

That's how quickly Ayyoub Momen, a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, can dry a piece of cloth with his protoype for a clothes dryer that utilizes high-frequency vibrations to turn water into steam. The technology is being developed for a full-fledged appliance and has the potential to save 1 percent of energy consumption in the U.S.

$75,000

That's how much Baltimore resident Michael Ghebru says he lost in liquor and food when his store, Doc’s Liquors, was looted during the riots surrounding the death of Freddie Gray. Some 50 rioters, including customers that Ghebru recognized, tore through his store in April. And due to laws about liquor stores in residential neighborhoods, he would also be out of luck when it comes to collecting insurance for his business from the city of Baltimore.

That is, of course because the Fed is legally obligated to deal with the labor market and inflation. DeKaser says consumer confidence tends to follow these things, not predict them. And when it comes to feelings about the future, he says “people say one thing and then do another.”

“Consumer confidence measures don’t have such a strong link to economic performance,” says Carl Tannenbaum, senior economist for Northern Trust. “They don’t lead the way you think they might.”

But, he says “ignore them at your peril.” Just because the Fed doesn’t parse them , doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t important.

“We should care about feelings because consumers have been excellent predictors of recession,” says Lynn Franco, director of Economic Indicators for the Conference Board, a key source of consumer confidence data. “They can give us advance notice of when the economy is heading south.”

Consumer expectations tend to be a little ahead of the game when it comes to the bounce back from a recession, Franco says. She says consumer confidence is also "a good indicator of people’s willingness to buy.”

Northern Trust’s Tannenbaum says the Fed does pay attention to our feelings on some level, because they reflect how the Fed's message is being received.

“When the Fed communicates with the public, they’re figuratively trying to put their arm around our shoulders and assure us that what they’re doing will be something that pleases us all,” he says.

So consumer confidence is, in a way, also a sign of how well we feel the Fed is doing its job.

]]>Tue, 28 Jul 2015 21:00:35 GMTWhy simple is best when it comes to corkscrewshttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/pro-tool-tools-professional/why-simple-best-when-it-comes-corkscrews

Why it's a Pro Tool: "It kind of looks like a pocket knife, you can fit it in your pocket. It's discreet and it's small and it fits just about anywhere ... But ultimately the most important aspect of this is the wine in and of itself. "

Click on the audio player below to hear Ascencios explain how to open a bottle of wine with the waiter's corkscrew — and why you may not want to pop the cork.

Since the Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling a month ago, gay rights advocates have been shifting the conversation to discrimination. A new bill in congress, introduced late last week, would ban discrimination based on sexuality or gender identity.

At the same time, same-sex marriage opponents have been talking about religious accommodations for those who don't want to participate in same-sex marriages, such as bakers who do not want to make wedding cakes for gay couples.

These developments come at a critical moment for gay rights advocates. There are concerns that they might have trouble fundraising, now that their biggest battle is over.

"Marriage equality is such a galvanizing issue, and people came to us and said 'I want to be a part of that movement,'" says Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of Equality Illinois.

Since the Illinois state legislature legalized same-sex marriage two years ago, Cherkasov says fundraising has gotten tougher. "We have to work harder right now for every single dollar that we raise," he says.

"There's palpable fear across the LGBT movement that people are going to think ... that somehow the fight is over," says Matt Foreman, program director at the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. The San Francisco-based foundation is one of the top donors to the LGBT movement.

Foreman expects fundraising will drop after the marriage victory. The question is by how much.

"There's a lot of work going on ... to try to figure out how to sustain our movement," Foreman says. "One is research into what motivates both current and prospective donors."

The Washington D.C.-based Freedom To Marry is one of the groups to which Foreman's foundation gives money. A few weeks after the same-sex marriage ruling, the group's founder, Evan Wolfson, announced that he is shutting down the organization, which, by its own estimate, had raised almost $60 million during its existence to campaign for same-sex marriage.

"There's been some admiration for the idea of an organization being able to say: 'We achieved our goal. We're going to shut down. We're not just going to muddle around and try to figure out what else we can do,'" Wolfson says.

But he is quick to say that while shutting down is the right move for his group, because its one goal was same-sex marriage, other gay rights groups should continue to address other areas of discrimination and to be sure they are getting their message out.

The day of the same-sex marriage ruling, many gay rights advocates not only celebrated the ruling, but pointed to other discrimination as their next battle front. Cherkasov, of Equality Illinois, has a similar message.

"In the majority of the country, it's legal to fire a gay person the morning after he gets married and brings a picture of his husband to his desk," Cherkasov says.

Whatever the cause, pivoting to other battles is important if a movement and the organizations connected to it are to survive, says Douglas McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, who has spent decades studying political and social movements.

"The standard thing is for an advocacy organization that achieves its goal to kind of rebrand itself," McAdam says, adding that there are plenty of cautionary examples throughout history of organizations that don't.

For example, the main goal of the women's suffrage movement of the early 1900s was the right to vote. Once that was achieved, "the movement did not identify new goals to continue to mobilize people and motivate fundraising," McAdam says. It took decades more before women's rights were being talked about again, in terms of equal pay and other discrimination, he says.

Evan Wolfson is optimistic about the gay rights movement's future. He says the good news is that gay advocacy groups are now in a better position for the battles ahead than when he started Freedom to Marry in 2001.

"The marriage conversation has brought many more people into our work, and into our movement, and into the discussion. So there are even more people to reach out to and help them understand why we need to keep going and do the next step and the next step," Wolfson says.

Tuesday morning brings Ford’s quarterly earnings report, as well as the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. The two events have a stronger economic link than one might think, because home building affects the Big Three automakers’ big time moneymakers, pickup trucks.

If builders are busy, they’re also confident enough about the future to upgrade to pickup trucks like the Chevy Silverado, Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram that haul lumber and supplies. And with home building on a post-crisis upswing, it looks like beat-up trucks are getting traded in.

“Pickup trucks got older and now for people who are users and put a lot of wear and tear on the trucks and a lot of mileage on the trucks, there’s a replacement cycle,” says auto analyst Maryann Keller.

There could be room for more growth in home construction too. According to housing economist Michael Carliner, there could be a 20 percent jump in single-family home construction from this year to next.

“We’re still building at a rate that’s well below what the underlying fundamentals would dictate,” he explains.

A further uptick in housing starts could put money not just in pockets of construction workers, but ultimately auto workers too.

That's BP's second-quarter loss, reported Tuesday morning. The company has been dealing not only with falling oil prices, but also the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, which has already cost $55 billion in pre-tax charges. And as the Wall Street Journal writes, Chief Financial Officer Brian Gilvary says the company is preparing for oil prices to stay low for much longer, given that the nuclear deal with Iran may open up new resources in the market.

177 countries

That's how many are competing in the Special Olympics World Games in Los Angeles; officials expect $100 million will be pumped into the city's economy as a result. The games have been gaining a higher profile lately, and at least one big sports broadcaster has taken notice. ESPN is producing daily segments from the games and is also maintaining a studio on site.

$8.6 billion

Speaking of the Olympics, that's how much a Boston Olympic Games was forecasted to cost. That is, until the city's bid was rescinded. As Reuters reports, the Olympic committee withdrew its bid to host the 2024 games after Boston's Mayor Marty Walsh said tax payers couldn't afford the price tag of such an event.

$60 million

That's how much "Freedom to Marry," a group advocating for same-sex marriage, raised during its existence. But following the Supreme Court Decision to extend the rights of marriage to same-sex couples, Freedom to Marry founder Evan Wolfson announced the organization would shut down, as its main goal had been achieved. With such a huge victory for LGBT advocates, many organizations find themselves bracing for a drop in donations, as some donors assume the biggest battle is over.

$150,000

That's how much a New Jersey man drove off with after two ATM workers left a bag of cash unattended. After replenishing machines in Mahwah, New Jersey, the workers accidentally left a white bag of cash on a nearby lawn and drove away. As the Associated Press writes, a passenger in a white van was filmed picking up the stash later on, as evidenced by surveillance footage.

A barrel of American crude is selling for less than $50 once again; a year ago the price was north of $90.

The bear market for oil production is a reaction to an unexpected glut, Marketplace's Scott Tong says. Last year, when OPEC signaled that it wouldn't cut the U.S. supply, oil producers all over the world kept pumping, he says. U.S. shale oil production keeps going, despite fracking. Saudi Arabia has record levels and Iraq oil is back "in a big way." Iranian could re-enter the market because of the potential lifting of sanctions.

Some analysts think the U.S. won’t see $100 barrels of oil for maybe five years, Tong says. The pessimists include drillers, who are cutting $200 billion in investments to stay afloat. Morgan Stanley likens this to the 1986 oil crash, which took the U.S. industry two decades to recover. Another camp says we’re in a new period of volatility. Before, OPEC was the price shock absorber, but it doesn't want that job any more. So perhaps we’ve entered the boom-bust-boom-bust chamber, he says.

All over the world, oil producers are struggling. In the oil sands area of Canada where it’s expensive to drill, unemployment has doubled and most new projects have been shelved. Venezuela is running out of petroleum revenue dollars to buy imports, which is especially problematic because most of its products are imported. Inflation there is 100 percent or more. Russia’s careening toward recession. In the Gulf of Mexico, drilling rigs have fallen by a thousand, and here in the United States, there have been tens of thousands of layoffs.

Oil producers are addicted to the revenue, but the picture is changing for consumers. According to the international energy agency, demand is slowing in rich countries – western Europe, Japan, the U.S. Even though emerging economies are buying more, demand will slow and eventually flatten out around 2040.

Conventional thinking might lead us to believe that people who reside in cities with higher living expenses probably also have the highest debt burdens. But residents of the City by the Bay have the least credit card burden of any major metropolitan city, according to a new study by CreditCards.com.

Using data from credit bureau Experian, CreditCards.com determined how long it would take for residents of 25 of the largest U.S. cities to pay off their current credit card debt. And the results were all over the map.

Metropolitan areas on the coasts tended to have lower credit card burden than elsewhere in the country, while areas of the South were on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Courtney Miller, an economics writer for NerdWallet, says a lot of it comes down to the culture surrounding credit card debt.

"I think there’s a ton of factors that go into it, and part of it is how much people need to rely on credit cards. So a city like San Francisco ... there [are] a lot of cash-only places in that kind of city."

San Antonio came in last place, where residents were projected to take the longest to pay off credit card debt — in fact, of the top 10 cities with the highest debt burden, seven were located in the South. Miller points to lower overall income in those areas, combined with a tendency towards higher credit card debt.

But there are a lot of moving parts to determining credit card debt. Take Alaska for example.

"They tend to have a higher credit card debt, but they actually have a pretty high credit score compared to the rest of the country ... (In Alaska), maybe you have to buy things online more, so you use a credit card more," Miller says.

JoAnn Henderson bought her house New Carrollton, Maryland, in 2001. She refinanced a few years later for a higher amount. Shortly before she retired from her teaching job, she started having trouble with the steep payments.

“You would miss a couple and then you’d pay and pay and pay," she says. "And then you’d miss a couple more. Yeah — I almost lost the house.”

Henderson got a loan modification, which dropped her interest rate to 3 percent. Now she’s even got a rainy day fund.

“A tiny one," she says, laughing. "Not a big rain. A small rain.”

What would really help Henderson is if the amount of her loan could be reduced in what’s called a principal reduction. Henderson owes more than $450,000 on her house, which is only worth $212,000, according to Zillow. She's underwater, owing more on her home than it's worth.

“It seems like principal reduction is a logical, no-brainer conclusion,” says Mitria Wilson, vice president of government affairs at the Center for Responsible Lending.

Wilson says the improving housing market has cut the number of underwater homeowners from 15 million to 4 million.

“So, the number’s gone down significantly, but here’s the rub," she says. "The people who make up that 4 million disproportionately have lower-priced homes.”

That aren’t likely to appreciate. So those homeowners will stay underwater.

Mel Watt will be making the decision on principal reduction. He’s head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They guarantee many U.S. mortgages.

Watt is caught between homeowner advocates like Wilson, and people like Tim Rood, chairman of the Collingwood Group of financial advisers. Rood wonders where the money for principal reduction would come from.

“This money doesn’t come out of thin air," he says. "So, it’s going to have to come from investors or from taxpayers.”

In congressional testimony, Mel Watt has said he’s looking at ways to help borrowers, without hurting Fannie and Freddie.

]]>Mon, 27 Jul 2015 10:00:49 GMTTwitter is the sincerest form of flatteryhttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/numbers/twitter-sincerest-form-flattery

$105 million

That's the record-breaking fine that Fiat Chrysler has been ordered to pay for failing to correctly carry out safety recalls. Not to mention an agreement in which the company will offer to buy back vehicles with defective suspension. As Forbes reports, the fine far outdoes the previous record holder — Honda Motor's $70 million payout for defective airbags.

9 months

That's how long it would take the average San Francisco resident to pay off his or her credit card debt, according to a new study. And in spite of being infamous for its high cost of living, San Francisco actually came in at the lowest end of the credit burden spectrum when it comes to major metropolitan areas. Cities in the South tended to fare much worse, with San Antonio residents needing 16 months to pay off credit card debt.

25,000

That's how many Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices Twitter received last year — complaints that someone has tweeted copyrighted material. Usually complaints are about video or photos, but now Twitter is responding to users claiming others have stolen their jokes. Mashable has called attention to a couple of tweets that have been hidden, due to what the blue bird deems as stealing from the "copyright holder." It's a tough battle to pick though, as other users have taken to copying multiple jokes to test the limits of the site's policing capabilities.

$6.63

That's the average price of a gallon of orange juice. The higher cost is being blamed on one of the smallest orange crops in years. But aside from a change in price, the orange juice industry is also experimenting with smaller packaging in response to consumers who want their dose of Vitamin C to go.

When Elvis Summers moved to South L.A. last August, he met Smokie, a 60-year-old homeless woman whose real name is Irene McGhee. She was living on the street and would come by to ask for recyclables.

When Summers learned about Smokie's living situation — essentially in the dirt, with a broken chair — Summers wanted to help. After $500 and a trip (or two) to Home Depot, a tiny home for Smokie was born:

The house was built on wheels and parked on the street — technically a vehicle under city law. As long as the home/vehicle is moved every 72 hours, it's allowed to stay.

After building Smokie's house, he continued to build tiny homes for other homeless individuals he met in the area: